On the evening of 26th Nov 09, after getting back home from first sem paper of the third sem, my twitter timeline showed an unusual tweet by @OldMonkMGM, a bong dude, and it was kinda fishy!!

Hmm...This dude has a weird sense of humour I thought, and casually proceeded to the site mentioned in the tweet for my daily dose of torrenting. And BOOOOOOM!! My world came crashing down upon me like a stack of cards squished by a mammoth!! Mininova was NOT Mininova anymore!! And gleaming away in all its HTML yellowish ribbony glory was this notice:

And I knew it at once..... Mininova had just died! The monk was right after all! You may want to read the original Mininova blog post before proceeding.

Now you're probably wondering why I'm so sad over the death of a site, that too of a P2P site, which we all know are sprouting like mushrooms all over the place!!

I've been living an active online life for over 8 years now!! It all started with a modest dialup internet connection, which when connecting to the interwebz sounded like a cat getting run over by a truck, and using which, downloading anything over 8-10 MB was considered simply impossible (or pathetically slow)!!

And then came the age of broadband... and I instantly realised what was at stake!! Every single file I had deemed unobtainable would soon be, well....... obtainable!! And with gleaming eyes and a hunger for information, I waited for the friendly neigbourhood BSNL-walla to call up and offer a broadband scheme. But that was not to be!!

Being in the middle-of-nowhere village that I am, acquiring a broadband connection was almost as difficult to get as getting John Abraham to show some facial expressions!! And after over a year of gadha-mazoori (mostly by my dad and a neighbourhood colleague of his), I secured a broadband connection in October 2008!!

Every broadband enabled friend I had had told me about torrenting, and I remembered my experiments with torrenting using a dialup modem (A movie that showed 1 year 2 weeks left for download to complete for nearly 24 hrs!!), and so I downloaded the eternally trustworthy uTorrent and began looking for torrent sites..... and the first, and by far the best one I found, had a name that instantly was etched upon my heart, MiniNova.

The site, which was founded in early 2005 by five Dutch students, instantly opened up a new world to me.... a world where sharing is caring, where seeding is next to godliness, where names like aXXo, nHaNc3, FxG and FxM are considered to be gods!! Where Robin Hood seemed to be everone's favourite story!! Living a life behind the mask of mysterious usernames, torrenters stole from the rich, and supplied to the poor, all without any compensation other than a "A/V 10/10" rating which implied the "rip" was perfect!! Despite initial doubts on the ethicality of P2P, I torrented, and boy, I torrentedlike hell was on fire!

formattingArtist's impression of aXXo!!

Movies that were not/yet to be released in India, Music by obscure yet amazing bands, E-books on everything ranging from Amateur photography to Zucchini modeling, Comics, Graphic novels, Games, High-res images of Jupiter, declassified FBI files, everything you could think of was right there on mininova!! And it was not just me.... a whole generation of people took to torrenting through mininova... so many infact, that Mininova ranked 9 on Google’s list of most queried terms in 2006. It recently even crossed the 10 billion torrent downloads mark!!

I loved Mininova so much that even after discovering sites like Torrentz.com, which showed torrent statistics from various torrent sites, I'd still religiously log on to Mininova almost everyday!! Mininova was the only torrent site on which I actually registered as a user, just so that I could be part of the community! Infact when ThePirateBay, another popular torrent site, let go of its tracker (again for legal reasons), I didn't care, since I knew I still had Mininova. When aXXo stopped putting up files, I didn't care, since I knew Mininova would show me equally good quality files. And now it's all gone!!

But most of all, I'll remember you as a source of endless hours of entertainment, and as a rebel against the system/rage against the machine kinda initiative that you were!!

You have nearly always answered my pleas for information and entertainment, and nearly all of my ~350 Gig torrented material directly or indirectly branches from you!

I hope you have a great time in website heaven... you're definitely in my Website Hall of Fame!! With the death of Mininova, comes the death of its active community(and my username:madmax108). Farewell homies!! God bless the 5 guys who came up with the concept of Mininova, and God bless every commenter on the site who'se valuable info has helped my pick out some of the best stuff I'll ever lay my hands upon!!

Apparently, Mininova became popular after its predecessor, named Suprnova, closed down (you guessed it right..... for legal reasons). Now that gets me thinking, will we see a Micronova soon?

P.S. I'm seriously thinking of staging my own Pirated Film Festival in memory of Mininova (and after reading the first comment in this post)... let's see how that plan works out!!

@Gandu M guessing you're Indian (going by the name :P), but I'd disagree that private trackers are better than public ones...I've had some pretty bad experiences with private trackers, including having a account deleted for no apparent reason!! So I say "Public tackers are teh sh1t!! :)"

@AnymousTorrenter I think we all agree!! We'll all be left with a void after Mininova's downfall!! :(